Photon flux determination for a precision measurement of the neutral pion lifetime
- Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington, KY (United States)
The Jefferson Lab Hall B PrimEx Collaboration is using tagged photons to perform a 1.4% level measurement of the absolute cross section for the photo-production of neutral pions in the Coulomb field of a nucleus as a test of Chiral Perturbation Theory. Such a high precision pushes the limits of the photon tagging technique in regards to the determination of the absolute photon flux. A multifaceted approach to this problem has included measuring the absolute tagging ratios with a Total Absorption Counter (TAC) as well as relative tagging ratios with a Pair Spectrometer (PS), and determining the rate of the tagging counters using multi-hit TDC's and a clock trigger. This enables the determination of the absolute tagged photon flux for the PrimEx experiment with uncertainty of ~ 1.0%, which is unprecedented. In view of the stringent constraints on the required precision of the photon flux for this experiment, periodicmeasurements of the pair production cross section were performed throughout the run. In these measurements, both the photon energy and flux were determined by the Jefferson Lab Hall B tagger, and the electron-positron pairs were swept by a magnetic field and detected in the new 1728 channel hybrid calorimeter (HyCal). The pair production crosssection was extracted with an uncertainty of ~ 2%, producing an agreement with theoretical calculations at the level of ~ 2%. This measurement provided a unique opportunity to verify the photon flux determination procedure for the PrimEx experiment.
- Research Organization:
- Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), Newport News, VA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-060R23177
- OSTI ID:
- 955697
- Report Number(s):
- JLAB-PHY-07-795; TRN: US1004722
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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